Microblogging as a Facilitator of Online Community in Graduate Education

Part-time and distance-learning students can experience a sense of isolation from their peers and the university. Concern about this isolation and resulting student attrition has increased in the midst of explosive growth in online course enrollments. One possible solution: building a stronger sense of community within the online graduate classroom using microblogging technology such as Twitter. Unfortunately, scholars across disciplines define community in different ways with some rejecting the concept altogether in favor of other theoretical constructs. And, few scholars have examined the notion of online classroom community from an English Studies perspective exploring the rhetorical exigencies that underpin this concept. Scholars often write about online community in aspirational terms and fail to demonstrate its existence empirically (Kling and Courtright, 2003). Through the application of two existing pedagogical theories (Rovai\u27s (2002) concept of classroom community and the well-established Community of Inquiry framework) this dissertation empirically documents the existence of online classroom community in two cases studies of graduate distance-learning summer sessions. This mixed-methods research study then demonstrates that microblogging technology is capable of both supporting and facilitating the growth of that sense of online classroom community. Because it stands at the convergence of a student\u27s academic and personal interests, social media software such as Twitter—whether used as a front- or backchannel to the course—is uniquely positioned to serve both as a virtual third place and as a venue for exercising Brooke\u27s (1999) writing underlife activities and extending Mueller\u27s (2009) notions of where and how these activities can be played out in a digital context. Finally, this dissertation also offers a five-part alternative definition of online classroom community that strongly links the digital space itself with the affective/emotional concerns addressed in some other theoretical constructions of community

Looking BK and Moving FD: Toward a Sociocultural Lens on Learning with Programmable Media

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected This chapter is a look back at ideas about programming as a form of digital media for learning in the mid-1990s to help realize more of the potential of these tools in the future. It presents a close examination of the work of children who became fluent in programming animations, games, and interactive stories using MicroWorlds Logo. A vignette from the creation of a movie remix by African American girls in a culturally relevant school is analyzed. Their work supports a constructionist perspective that children can learn both programming and other subject-matter ideas through creating personally meaningful projects with programmable media. Unexpected from this view is that the children brought practices from living culturally to define and produce their project and that these cultural practices were integral to their learning. Implications are outlined for educators, policy makers, and researchers to use views of culture in learning with programmable media to connect more children to the benefits of these media

The Power of Connections: An Online Doctoral Program\u27s Use of Strategic Onboarding to Enhance the Doctoral Experience

A positive doctoral experience is rooted in an understanding of the expectations and reality of doctoral–level work. Students need specific knowledge, skills, and mindsets to complete coursework, critically analyze research, and write and defend a research dissertation. Despite a mutual commitment to academic achievement and graduation by faculty and students, attrition in doctoral programs remains high. This rate is even higher for those in online programs. Additionally, there are many challenges doctoral students experience outside of the core curriculum. The challenges facing students vary depending on the phase of the doctoral journey and the individual development of each student. This dissertation is a report of a mixed methods action research study that identified the needs of doctoral students across the doctoral journey and explored how a strategically designed onboarding process impacted awareness of doctoral expectations and a sense of connectedness of doctoral students. Findings indicate that established practices of the department and added features to the onboarding process positively impacted students’ sense of connectedness and awareness of program expectations and information. The findings of this study encourage leadership and faculty members of online doctoral programs to consider department–led efforts designed to strengthen a student\u27s connectedness with peers and faculty members and increase their awareness of expectations and available resources. The power of these connections can support doctoral students toward an enhanced doctoral experience and persistence toward degree completion

The Use of a Digital Question Board to Facilitate Student Questioning and Engagement in Large Lecture Classes: A Mixed-Methods Study

A lack of student questioning and engagement is faced by many universities, where a large lecture is a common practice. Emerging technologies bring about possibilities to fill this gap. This study applied constructivist learning theories and used a digital canvas as a Digital Question Board (DQB) for students to freely pose questions and respond using mobile technology. A mixed-methods study with a quasi-experiment was conducted to investigate the following research questions (RQs): (1) Do students demonstrate different questioning behaviors when provided access to a DQB from those students who are not provided with access to a DQB in large lecture classes? and (2) How does having access to a DQB during large lecture classes influence students’ level of engagement? The study was conducted in two groups of an introductory research methodology course in a large comprehensive university in eastern China (n = 253). The pre-post quasi-experiment lasted six weeks. The data from surveys, interviews, observation, and online posts (log data) were collected and analyzed. The results revealed that when the instructor discussed student questions after every 20–30 minutes in large lecture classes, students with DQB access had a significantly higher frequency of questioning than those without a DQB. The presence of the DQB enriched the types of questions and responses and encouraged mostly on-task learning questions. Having DQB access also greatly improved students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement and facilitated emotional engagement. With technology, students employed a non-linear, constructivist questioning process and actively contributed to the co-construction of knowledge. The presence of the DQB reduced the social pressure of questioning in large lecture classes. This research might contribute to the educational practices and theories as it depicted the patterns of student questioning in technology-mediated large lecture classes, proposed how to design constructivist instructional strategies better to encourage all students to freely pose questions and receive feedback without fear of embarrassment and being judged

Visual abstracts to disseminate research on Twitter: a quantitative analysis

The Web has indisputably changed the way researchers share information. Web-based scholarly communication allows to rapidly disseminate research findings, to reach a broader audience, to transversely connect different contents through hypertext linkages, to update and correct texts if needed, and to integrate multimedia materials. Moreover, it allows interactivity and real-time exchange between authors and readers. Such features are even more evident in the context of the so-called Web 2.0, which involves user-generated content, data sharing, and collaborative efforts. The diffusion of social software and web-based applications has lead to a new use of the Web as a platform for generating, re-purposing and consuming scientific content. Social media brought additional advantages and challenges: they help to fulfill the demand for cheap, instant communication in a context of growing collaborative and interdisciplinary research, but they also, for example, add complexity in terms of quantification of the impact of scientific articles. Nevertheless, researchers are now using social media platforms in every phase of the research lifecycle, from identifying opportunities to disseminating findings. In particular, Twitter, the microblogging platform that allows users to post/publish short messages up to 140 (now 280) characters, has emerged as a powerful tool in scholarly communication. Indeed, it connects researchers around the world (both within and outside one\u2019s research field), giving them the chance to communicate and discuss research findings with the rest of the scientific community, to provide and receive post-publication critiques, and to increase the reach and the impact of their work. Recently, also scientific journals adopted social media, and Twitter in particular, to disseminate research findings published on their pages and websites. In the field of biomedical research, this led to the development of new strategies of dissemination..

Collaboration and Community in Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (SVCs)

From the 2013 Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI), OWI Principle 11 suggests, “Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success.” Previous discussions of synchronous modalities have suggested interpersonal benefits of this mode could aid in creating these communities and could minimize the isolation and transactional distance students can experience in asynchronous instruction, which in turn can impact their persistence and learning. However, with little research on this modality, it is difficult to corroborate this assumption or design synchronous courses to best exploit these potential benefits. This study examined a particular type of synchronous online writing course, synchronous video courses (SVCs), exploring how and why students participated and interacted in certain ways in these courses and how their experiences influenced their sense of community and learning. A triangulated methodology of discourse analysis of class interactions and thematic analysis of interviews with students and instructors from the observed courses was used to present the prevalent discourse patterns within these courses and to contextualize these patterns within students’ and instructors’ experiences. Challenges for verbal interaction, the role of textual interaction, the value of small group interaction, and the impact of interfaces on learning emerged as key findings to understand this modality. The findings suggest there is value in this instructional modality, but it requires unique pedagogical strategies and specific training for students and instructors

Information architecture for social media: a case study on building an event backchannel with Twitter

This paper presents a case study on creating a backchannel through Twitter for the live event, featuring the Secretary of the US Navy, hosted by the School of Government. The project, which ultimately was successful in creating social media buzz for the lecture, was a new approach for the School of Government in how it markets its events. The study discusses the tools and processes used in the backchannel’s creation and development. This paper was written because the author discovered a gap in existing literature on creating backchannels. It outlines how the adaptation of best practices from the general population’s use of Twitter in creating a backchannel for an educational event. While this study focuses specifically on the promotion of a live event, the concepts and principles discussed here also are applicable to instructors interested in providing their students with an environment for differentiated learning and informal communication

Mechanisms of alignment:Shared control, social cognition and metacognition

In dialogue, speakers process a great deal of information, take and give the floor to each other, and plan and adjust their contributions on the fly. Despite the level of coordination and control that it requires, dialogue is the easiest way speakers possess to come to similar conceptualizations of the world. In this paper, we show how speakers align with each other by mutually controlling the flow of the dialogue and constantly monitoring their own and their interlocutors' way of representing information. Through examples of conversation, we introduce the notions of shared control, meta-representations of alignment and commentaries on alignment, and show how they support mutual understanding and the collaborative creation of abstract concepts. Indeed, whereas speakers can share similar representations of concrete concepts just by mutually attending to a tangible referent or by recalling it, they are likely to need more negotiation and mutual monitoring to build similar representations of abstract concepts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’